First and foremost is the realization that, while not all Germans are anti-Semitic, there is an anti-Semitic tendency within German culture that extends back to the time of Martin Luther. Germans are instinctively anti-Semitic in the same way that Americans are instinctively freedom-loving. Anti-Semitism has been and unfortunately remains the default ideology of the German people.

First and foremost is the realization that, while not all Americans are anti-intellectual, there is an anti-intellectualist tendency within American culture that extends all the way back to the time of Edward Rutledge. Americans are instinctively education-hating in the same way that the Japanese are instinctively obsessed with cute little girls. Anti-intellectualism has been and unfortunately still remains the default ideology of the American people.

Hitler dumped his anti-semitism on a bemused German people, and had to work hard to make it prevail in everyday German life. It was up to Goebbels and his team to come up with slogans like "Judentum ist Verbrechertum" and "The Jews are our misfortune". When signs went up in German towns saying "Juden, hier sind Sie unerwünscht", many people were shocked, but they went along with it, because not following Nazi party policy was rather foolish if you valued your freedom.

Anti-Semitic tendency within German culture, and the rest of Europe, extends back to the Middle Ages- 6th or 7th century, if I had to guess. However, I never encountered it when I lived there.
Beer is the default ideology of the German people.

I will say that they do not have the same attitude toward Jews that open-minded Americans do about minority faiths. I was a foreign exchange student there and had some discussions with my host family about the matter. While they didn't outright express antisemitism, they did say that they were "not Germans" (even those who had lived there for generations). This struck my American sensibilities as strange, as I consider any American citizen an American, regardless of color or creed.
Was my host family representative of their peers? I don't know. Is it antisemitic to say they're not German? Not sure. Even we Americans hyphenate when speaking of certain minority or immigrant groups.

Which is why Jews were so assimilated into German culture that Hitler had to dedicate whole bureaus and special sorting machines to tracking them down. And by the way, he was an Austrian.

You know, I never thought about this before. As far as I know there weren’t any Jewish “schtetls” in Germany as they were common in Eastern Europe.

Jewish businesses were in fact so much indistinguishable from “normal German” ones that the SA hat do mark them with big painted stars of David and the word “Jude” (German for Jew). And the Jews themselves had to wear the yellow star of David, otherwise they wouldn’t be recognizable as “different”.

For the most part Jews were just normal Germans that went to different churches, on Saturday instead of Sunday.